The Ignorance Quotient

THE DIVIDE

When did the celebration of ignorance become part of America’s exceptionalism?

When did we begin to ignore the truths found in scholarship, science, education, knowledge, authority, humanity, experience, wisdom?

Has this essential failure always been part of our national DNA?

Or has the obvious weakening of all the systems that are the basis of our society caused significant cracks in our national foundation so deep and widespread that we face a threat to the entire ”house” that is America – a threat that increasingly seems very real and very dangerous?

And if the answer is yes, then the most important question of all: must we experience a collapse before corrective action is taken to save our Nation?

We know America is divided… many believe divided as never before. Divided on politics, on race, on immigration and economic policy, even on public health in the midst of a worldwide pandemic.

Perhaps we have been divided since the landed gentry of plantation owners and businessmen, America’s first powerbrokers, wrote our Declaration of Independence and then the document which turned 13 colonies into the United States of America – our Constitution – a brilliant but flawed bible which immediately, if gently, divided us between the haves and the have nots.

In many ways we are still fighting the Civil War, a war which killed more Americans than all the wars before and since. The industrializing North vs. the agrarian South; white businessmen, plantation owners, farmers vs those who supported freedom for the black slaves brought over from Africa; the evangelicals who came to America to escape religious persecution vs those who believed in an America where living free meant living without overbearing religious constraints.

The North and South at war then…and eerily, now.

Looking at today’s landscape one can almost see that same divide. The Southern States whose leaders who ignore the need for vaccinations and mask wearing despite the frightening increase of Covid vs the Northern States who constantly pressure for vaccinations and mask wearing.

As for the political parties, the divide is stunning today. When did it start to exceed what we expect and go beyond our comfort zone?

Was it Richard Nixon’s law and order campaign based on the idea of Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan that he allow drug money to flow through the minority community to keep peace and order?

Was it Ronald Reagan’s racist-tinged campaign which endeared him to those evangelical Southerners who have been fighting abortion since the Supreme Court established that women could control their own bodies…a fight which continues more vigorously these days than in recent years?

Did it start with Karl Rove’s effort to establish an endless Republican hold on the Presidency by damning all liberals and moderates in any number of ways? Where the idea that lying to the American people works if you just keep the lies going?

Was it Newt Gingrich closing down government to force a Democratic President to agree to his terms despite the hardships that would result?

Was it Mitch McConnell standing before the nation immediately following the election of Barack Obama shamelessly declaring that the chief objective of the Republican Party was to stop the new President from ever adopting any of the programs and policies that got him elected?

Or was it today’s reality that Republican Senators and Congress members have all become Lindsay Grahams, bowing, scraping and even kneeling before the demands of King Donald the First?

As for the Democrats, they move uneasily, haltingly, carefully through the greatest divide of all: young vs old. Older moderates and liberals hold tight against the ideas of the young progressives who seek to remake the Democratic Party in their image: seeing new truths and the need to end policies and attitudes which work against people of color, immigrants and the poor.

A divide so intense that it threatens to interrupt and perhaps destroy the Biden Administration’s desire to pass legislation that would address physical and social infrastructure in this nation for the first time in generations.

And yet this national divide does not answer the previous questions: how do we survive as a nation if we no longer recognize truths from lies, facts from fiction, misinformation or disinformation from reality, actions which ignore or refute “what is” and depend on what is not?

There must be change based on the recognition that America no longer operates on a level of competence based on education, knowledge and humanity. Our systems must be reset.

CRACKED SYSTEMS

There is only one military-industrial complex. It is unique, powerful, expensive. Wars have been fought, the nation prepared, the lobbyists involved, the politicians attuned to the smell of money that flows from military spending.

In his final speech before stepping away after eight years as President, Dwight D. Eisenhower made the only remarks remembered during those years when he warned the Nation about the military-industrial complex and its outsized influence on the Legislature, Presidents and so on the American public.

While he was essentially talking about the business structure of budgets based on military needs and corporate money-making, he could easily have been talking about a military which was used to getting what it wanted.

Maybe that included the ability to lie about its activities.

There is no question that from William Westmoreland down, the Generals lied to President Lyndon Johnson about our so-called progress and successes in Vietnam. Johnson in turn lied to the American public with the information he received and believed.

Now we wonder if the Generals have been lying to four Presidents in the 20 years we have been in Afghanistan.

How else can we understand how an Afghan Army of 300,000 trained, armed, supplied and paid by America and fighting next to our soldiers for 20 years could literally disappear in less than a week as we withdrew from the country…without us having any clue about that possibility?

No matter what is said, how many explanations we receive, what political line we take or even our failure to ever understand who these people are, the incompetence here is staggering. Frightening.

As political commentator Maureen Dowd said in the New York Times: we should have known about 9/11 but we didn’t. We should have known about January 6 but we didn’t. We should have known about Afghanistan but we didn’t. What else don’t we know?

Is the term military intelligence an oxymoron?

Or is the entire intelligence system just full of dangerous cracks?

PUBLIC HEALTH

The chaos of dealing with Covid-19 and its variants is a stunning example of ignorance so broad and inclusive that people have died and will continue to die no matter how hard we work to prevent that conclusion.

Too many millions of Americans sincerely believe that Covid is just another form of the flu…a disease that comes and goes and changes every year or two. Most Americans never take a flu shot and never even think about it.

The failure of the government and the scientists at the CDC and FDA to fully explain to this country – and the World – why Covid is like no other disease we have seen before and explain it so well that people understood it enough to fear it…is a failure that has kept the disease alive and mutating causing more sickness, more death, including a younger and younger population…knowing now that after Delta comes Lambda and more trouble…. while one-third of Americans still refuse to be vaccinated.

Just the reality that a third vaccination – a booster – is becoming a necessity should be a clue to the future.

What flu has ever needed three vaccinations within a year?

But those like Dr. Anthony Fauci, a political operative if there ever was one, who somehow takes a quiet stance against a public menace that the medical and scientific field is still trying to get its hands around, does not help. And when the CDC changes its collective mind several times in a week – that does not help either.

The field of public health is in the shadows compared to those in cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s research. Their basic inability to deliver the message has been a failure that has caused lives.

PUBLIC EDUCATION

Our system of public education already ruined over the years by poor teacher training and disastrous political interference had no chance to deal effectively with Covid. Our children have lost two years of education and are about to lose more as the Delta variant sickens enough children to already close school systems which opened up just days ago.

The utter failure to deal with the first year and a half of Covid, to provide any education to those millions of children at home has been obvious to all who would look.

The fight against vaccinations, the inability to vaccinate our youngest, the pros and cons of mask-wearing causing public fights at School Board meetings…all of it is a disaster for the children and those teachers who see it and are essentially helpless.

The immediate future is cloudy and uncertain…but the result smells of more failure.

SYSTEMIC CHANGE

America can no longer believe it is as special as we want it to be unless we have the strength to fill the cracks in the systems that make us work as a nation.

There are no easy answers. The Me Generation, the Me-Too generation must find the way to go beyond immediate concerns and lifestyles to recognize that electing and following old men in leadership positions is NOT what made America a Worldwide power of historical proportions.

Yes, we are looking for leadership to those in midlife who used to lead us knowing full well that most today never had the depth of education that their grandparents received. Maybe that is the hardest reality to swallow. But if we don’t or can’t we are begging for more of the same incompetence.

Can we ever heal those divisions?

Can a woke generation deal with a privileged generation…can suburban and rural folks deal with elites and cosmopolitans so that all find the mid-ground that can carry us forward?

Can we remember that America is a country of immigrants and take the steps necessary to welcome those who come legally and find methods to make legal immigration a reality for those running in fear from cruel nations with no regard for humanity?

Can those who resent and fear the reality that white people in America will very soon be in a minority ever recognize that fear, resentment and violence have never been answers anywhere, not in any nation, not in any hemisphere. It might feel good but it all fails.

We will never shut down the social media outlets which are open to misinformation, disinformation, hate and bullying because there is too much money involved and this is America where money talks.

But can our system of public education be strengthened and expanded to include genuine teaching and learning about American history and values…two areas sorely missing from education today. Fix that and those social media bots will no longer be so influential.

These are massive challenges facing a Nation in decline and understandably so.

But these are not riddles to be solved by geniuses but problems which involve knowledge, wisdom and caring and are all about people capable of having and appreciating all of it.

There may not be much we can actually do to deal with climate change and the difficulties ahead. But it is in crisis that this Nation has always prevailed.

That crisis exists today. That much we do know.